Book Review: I Know What You Did Last Summer by Lois Duncan

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Venganza Media, Inc.

Film Reviews, Film Interviews, Film History, Tv & Film:film Reviews, Tv & Film

4.6 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 27 June 2025

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Do you think you know what they did last summer? Think again! Our 2025 Summer/Fall Donation Drive kicks off today with our review of I Know What You Did Last Summer, the 1997 slasher that made hook hands cool again. But before the gore, there was... guilt? In this bonus episode, Arnie digs into the 1973 young-adult novel by Lois Duncan. But slasher fans be warned: there's no fisherman, no slickers, and definitely no body count. Just a group of teens, a hit-and-run, and a slow-burning mystery that’s more Nancy Drew than Ghostface. Find out what changed, what got lost in translation, and why Duncan was not thrilled with the adaptation, in this bonus book review podcast.

Transcript

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0:00.0	We're going home now and never, ever, ever, under any circumstances known to God, speak about this again.
0:09.0	Is that clear? It's not merely a future therapy bill, agreed?
0:14.0	We make a pact. Right here and now we take the sorrow grave.
0:19.0	Agreed.
0:24.3	I'll never mention it again.
0:27.2	Okay, Barry, we take this to the grave.
0:31.3	I'm going to be sick, she thought.
0:36.4	Her legs felt weak, and she reached out and caught hold at the edge of the table to steady herself.
0:38.2	It's a dream, she told herself hopefully. I'm not really awake in standing here in the dining room at all. I'm lying in bed
0:43.5	upstairs, asleep, and this is only a nightmare like the ones I used to have back in the beginning.
0:48.4	I'll close my eyes, and when I open them, I will wake up. It will be gone. The paper will be
0:53.8	gone. It will never have been. So she closed her eyes, and when I open them, I will wake up. It will be gone. The paper will be gone. It will never have been.
0:56.2	So she closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, the paper was still there in her hand,
1:01.0	with one short sentence printed on it. I know what you did last summer.
1:07.6	Hello, Now Playing listeners. This is Arny, and welcome back for another book review here at Now Playing.
1:14.3	We do them infrequently, but I always do enjoy getting a chance to talk about some printed stories as well as the visual ones.
1:21.4	And today, for our $10 patrons and donors, we're starting our I Know What You Did Last Summer Retrospective series
1:28.6	leading up to the legacy sequel coming out in just a few weeks.
1:32.9	As part of that donation series, we're reviewing the original film, the sequel, the direct-to-video
1:39.0	sequel, the one-season TV series, and then, yeah, the new movie coming out.
1:44.5	And here I am to review the source novel, for I Know What You Did Last Summer.
1:50.6	Now, I'll admit, going into this retrospective series,
	...

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